The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  Josh leapt forward and snatched a fistful of Saskia’s jacket. Dannika took the other side, dragging her closer to the riverbank and holding her there.

  “Guys . . . you shouldn’t,” Amanda hazarded. Amanda was a Mundane, too, after all. Self-preservation was kicking in. Maybe she’d be next.

  Saskia dug her heels into river muck, the hunters getting closer.

  “Let me go!” she yelled, smashed the back of her head into Josh’s face and heard a satisfying crunch, but with that he dropped Saskia onto the bank in a heap. She cracked her forehead on a rock, stars blooming in her vision.

  “Shit!” Josh said. “Let’s get out of here, Mandy.”

  Saskia raised her head, vision bleary. A river hunter was nose to nose with her. It smelled like rotting fish. Its toxic teeth, cracking jaws, and claws were an inch-away promise.

  She didn’t move. The red eyes were locked on her. She had nothing to fight back with.

  A twig snapped. Saskia whipped up to her knees, then her weak legs, because the river hunters perked at Dannika, who had stepped forward with a hand out.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Saskia hissed. “Either earthquake these things into oblivion or run.”

  “C’mon, Danni!” Josh was a Fox, at least, but he looked like the only thing he’d ever set on fire were his pants when he fell asleep smoking. “Let’s go!”

  Dannika crept closer, lip quirking. “They won’t attack us. We’re true believers. The Dark Moon sent them to test us.”

  Now Dannika was beside Saskia. Saskia’s head throbbed, and those blooming stars in her vision popped, fizzled. A buzzing in her ear, like a mosquito hovering when she was half-asleep. She twitched. Not now. The stars in her vision were turning pink. Turning red.

  The nearest river hunter had reared up slowly, as if it was sniffing in Dannika’s direction.

  Then it was suddenly on her face, shrieking and writhing and biting, and Dannika was screaming, and Josh and Amanda were already running away as fast as they could. Reflexively, Saskia dove, grabbing the thing, throwing herself on top of it till she wrenched it off Dannika and hurled it back to the riverbank with what little strength she had.

  The two other river hunters watched the first one splash and disappear. But they turned back to Saskia. The sparks in her dotted vision suddenly resolved.

  The sigils, this time, were clear, and lined up over the river hunters, like a label. Saskia could understand them.

  Mother, they said.

  A river hunter surged forward and Saskia braced herself for the attack, but its slick arms went around her, protective and pleading, travelling up her body and twisting about her outstretched arm like a contented snake.

  It looked down at Dannika, terror-stricken and bleeding by Saskia’s feet, and roared.

  Dannika finally managed to get her legs back under her, tearing off after Josh and Amanda, who had been watching from the crest of the hill.

  “You freak!” Dannika wasn’t dead yet if she was still hurling insults — but with the bite Saskia had witnessed, she might not be too far off once the river hunter infection took hold.

  The river hunter wrapped around Saskia’s arm hissed, but loosened, calm. Then it clicked at Saskia disapprovingly, a purple tongue flicking out to the blood coming down the side of her head, her ear.

  The sigils were flexing, but fading, and Saskia tried to blink them away. Protect our own, the sigils said, or had the hunter said it?

  It slid away, then, back into the river with its sibling as if it had never been there at all. The sigils were gone completely when the creature disappeared.

  Omand’s Creek was silent but for the roar in Saskia’s ears and her ringing skull. She staggered and turned, because there was another sound. The flutter of wings.

  She was wider than the bridge’s struts, and her uncountable hands were folded in front of her beneath a cloak hewn from dried leaves, the husks of departed creatures. The Moth Queen was as horribly tangible now as she’d been last night in the interrogation room. She was here. She was real.

  “So now you see,” the Moth Queen said, her cloud of children hovering about her twitching leaf-antennae.

  Saskia swallowed, swiping the blood mixed with river hunter saliva from her ear and wiping it on her jeans — she hoped she wasn’t infected now, too.

  “At the risk of sounding dumb,” she said, “I don’t know exactly what I saw.” Did she want to know?

  One needle-tipped finger stretched, and though she was far away, it was still within reach of Saskia’s forehead. “You saw the sigils. You bear a darkness within you, child. One you cannot escape. But one that might yet save us all.”

  Saskia wanted to collapse, or run. She could do neither.

  “No. Whatever that plague was, I was healed. I survived. I’m not a Cinder Kid anymore.” But she had seen those red sigils, letters or runes that told their own story, even before today. She’d draw them in the dirt, in the air, to calm herself down. Since Barton pulled her out of that tree, she never saw them again. Until the last couple of days. Saskia didn’t like what the sigils could mean or what they were telling her. Mother, the river hunters had called her. That’s what they’d called Zabor.

  The Moth Queen couldn’t smile — there was barely a mouth there, pinched and small, even with her enormous, hissing groan of a voice. But she sounded pleased. “You destroyed the Gardener when you were but a girl. Not an easy feat to come back from. Not without help.”

  Then Saskia felt it — like a smudge on her skin, where the Moth Queen pointed. It felt impossibly cold, like an ice pack had been pressed there. When she glanced into the brown water of the creek by the little footbridge, she saw the dark thing there. A black circle with wings in the negative space.

  “You marked me?” she croaked, turning back, expecting the Moth Queen to never have been there at all. But now the Moth Queen was close, towering over Saskia. Now Saskia felt a new sensation — one that begged her to close her eyes, to embrace eternity.

  “Not just me. Something else marked you. And your time is not yet come.” The Moth Queen was reassuring, running a sharp and delicate hand tenderly over Saskia’s head. “There is a war happening alongside the one in your world. One I can see but can do nothing about. But you? Child of the Bloodlands, aided by Death. Perhaps you can go where I cannot.”

  Saskia cringed, had to move away as far as she could. “I’m tired of all these riddles and prophecies. You made it sound like I should take what Chancellor Grant offered me. And these sigils, and that noise, and now river hunters are acting like obedient guard dogs around me? It doesn’t make sense. It can’t. So I need you tell me straight — what do you want?”

  The Moth Queen hadn’t moved. Saskia thought she saw a tremble of something beneath her many gaping eyes. Uncertainty?

  “No one has asked me what I want, before,” Death finally admitted, head tilted.

  “Oh,” Saskia said, clever retorts all dried up. She looked down again at her reflection in the water and heard, felt, the Moth Queen draw up next to her and look down into the water, too.

  “I want to return to where I am of use,” the Moth Queen went on. “I have been barred from going back to the Realms of Ancient. To do what I am made for. Even Death can grieve for all the Denizen souls left wandering, away from their ancestors and their due, these seven dreadful years. I am a mother in my own way. It is unbearable to me.”

  Saskia was surprised to hear the fatigue in the Moth Queen’s voice, the raw, almost-human regret tinging the painful-to-hear voice. “Am I being chosen now? Like Roan was?”

  The Moth Queen turned so quickly the sound was like a massive tree collapsing into a ravine. Saskia flinched.

  “Chosen?”

  “Well!” Saskia threw her arms up. “The dreams! The messages! You need me, don’t you?”

  The Moth Queen turned and dr
agged her massive thorax to the rock that Dannika had only just vacated and sat down, folding her twiggy hands beneath her sharp chin. “Do you remember me, child? From before? From inside the tree?”

  Saskia had expected more riddles, not direct questions, or even a conversation, from what had to have been the most complex creature out of Ancient’s legendarium. She knew immediately what the Moth Queen meant, though, and her memory of Urka — of the blow Saskia herself had delivered that ended it — rose quickly before her like an auto-accessed video file.

  “Sort of,” Saskia said.

  The Moth Queen nodded, to herself. “I wove your very cocoon. But you, like the Fox kit Roan, slipped it. Ancient chose Roan, yes. For what reason now, I cannot surmise. So much is wrong. So much is uncertain. Why would Ancient wish Death to be parted from Ancient’s own creation? Why would the gods now be silent?”

  Her shoulders fell, just a little, her wings shivering. “But just as Roan carried death inside her after escaping it, so have you. And much more than that, you carry the Darkling mark. Their creatures see you as one of them — you were, once, carrying Seela’s plague as a child of the Bloodlands. And part of their song has been left inside you.”

  Saskia’s head swam— and not from hitting that rock. She stepped away from the water and stood in front of the Moth Queen, squeezing her arms into her body. “What do you want me to do?”

  The Moth Queen looked directly at Saskia, as if her body was going to open up and devour her. Instead she sighed, the sound of a house fire going out.

  “What I want, in the end, doesn’t matter,” she said. Saskia felt the tears come fierce and sudden, and the Moth Queen held up her hand. “Listen carefully. Your capabilities could be of use. But the choice isn’t mine. It never has been. That is what is at stake here. There are no chosen ones. Only the choices that you make. The world will turn, and things can happen with or without you. You must decide your place in that. You must choose. The Narrative was only one plan. But the story has already been rewritten.”

  Saskia cast her eyes on her feet and realized her nails were biting into her forearms. “I want to help, though. I want to fight.”

  “So do I.” The Moth Queen’s voice echoed across the small creek, and when Saskia looked up, there was just a single moth, fluttering in her face and landing on her forehead. But the moth seemed to sink into her skin and vanish, and Saskia knew that the smudge had vanished with it. Not gone, just quiet. Waiting.

  “Take comfort from your family,” came the last whisper inside Saskia’s head. “Whatever you choose, they will need you before this is over.”

  Family. Now Saskia sank to her knees, looking over to the train bridge and back to Wellington Crescent as the sun crept higher, the dark moon following. Death was a neutral aspect of Ancient.

  She was more naïve than she thought.

  Ella wasn’t coming back, and even if she was, what would Saskia say to her? Turns out maybe I’m a Denizen after all. But my Family is Darkling. My Family is going to end everything.

  What did any of it mean? And if Roan Harken were here, wouldn’t she just rush into the fray, consequences be damned?

  Saskia got to her feet after a while, cold and sore, head throbbing. She wasn’t Roan Harken, no matter how much she wished it. No. This was so much bigger than Saskia, than her fear, than all of it. She had to be smart, like she knew she could be.

  She had to talk to the chancellor. Then she had to talk to Phae. And maybe, now that destiny was no longer a factor, they could make their own choices about where they would end up.

  Saskia ran, fast as Barton, for home.

  Signal Across the Void

  “What sort of signal?” the priest asked.

  The other man shifted on his feet, staring at the black granite of the floor. It was speckled with silver veins, catching the odd light of the LED lamps brought down to illuminate the space. Once, golden circles may have shone there. Or the reflection of fire. Deon’s fire. Now it was cold and dark, the hearth at the back of the room empty. Same with the alcove hidden beneath it, where the Dragon Opal had been stashed. But that was a long time ago.

  The man stared upward, where the sky was, somehow feeling it was very far away. “They don’t know yet. It came through when the moon began tracking, through Project Crossover’s great machine. There’s part of it missing, it seems, and no instrument can interpret it. Yet.” His chin tucked. “The Task Guard will move on this quickly. We will have to be quicker.” The visitor tensed. “Grant believes it is something that will turn the tide. Open his Bloodgate. Win his war.”

  The priest was in the centre of the room, his back to the visitor, as he worked at something on the floor. He nodded. “And Grant believes that the key lies with someone he recently arrested. A girl, to whom he’s just offered a job.”

  The visitor had come thinking that all his intel was new, but the priest had his little followers everywhere.

  “History does have a habit of repeating itself,” the priest muttered bitterly, flushing out the lines, the shapes, with a lump of red pastel clutched in his tight fist. He stopped suddenly and glanced about the chamber. “If this house were alive, it could tell you.” It sounded as if he believed it was.

  Then the priest sighed and leaned back on his thighs, surveying the work on the floor. Sigils fanned out before him. The knees of his pants were coated in red, as if he’d been praying in an abattoir.

  No golden circles here. But red ones. Even in the semi-dark, that much was clear.

  “We all have our parts to play,” the priest said. “Keep an eye on the girl. And when the time is right, she will come to us. Then we can test whether or not she has her part, too.”

  Then he looked upward as the visitor had, to the ceiling of the basement, imagining that, above him, the Darkling Moon moved. Scrutinizing his work. Approving it.

  The visitor clenched his cherrywood cane, caught up in his own mire of thoughts, and gladly left the priest to himself.

  * * *

  “Surely this isn’t necessary, Chancellor.”

  Phae stood tall in the spartan living room. The children were crowded in the kitchen. She was trying her best to be a shield, as always. Saskia knew that she’d put up an actual shield, if she had to.

  From Saskia’s hiding place in the apartment’s interior entryway, her fists shook. When she’d come to her front door, which was flanked by two ETG personnel she’d never seen before, she’d had enough sense to come inside quietly, though she couldn’t hide here forever. In the kitchen, Victor was standing in front of Jet, who was shivering behind his legs. Lily clutched Victor’s hand. They were all confused, terrified. Saskia didn’t blame them, and the look on Jet’s face was like a frozen knife in her side.

  “Saskia Allen Das is your charge, is she not?” the chancellor asked Phae.

  Phae kept her face impassive. “You wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t. I’m already well aware of her transgressions. And I didn’t think I’d have the honour of you gracing us with your presence.” She folded her arms. “I would have catered.”

  Saskia bit back a snicker.

  The chancellor, though, let out a low, forced laugh. “I can see why Barton was fond of you.”

  Phae’s dropped, pained gaze made Saskia’s skin burn. The chancellor smiled stiffly, making the sharp lines along his cheeks look like incised scars. “In any case, I’m not here to speak to you this time, Ms. Das. Though if you’ll find your way to putting me in touch with your friend Nattiq Fontaine, I’d be more than obliged.”

  Phae raised an eyebrow at his changing tack. “I haven’t heard from Natti in years, Chancellor. No one really has. I’m not sure exactly what you want from her. Or from Saskia.”

  He shrugged. “These are troubling times. The more allies we have for order, the better off we’ll all fare.”

  Grant turned towards the kitchen. Jet tried to mak
e himself smaller. “There’s no need to be afraid,” the chancellor reassured, holding out his hands. “I’m not the one who wants to hurt you. But you can help me, if you’re so inclined, by telling me where your foster sister is.”

  Phae slid in front of him. “What do you want here? I thought you cleared Saskia of any wrongdoing last night. Has she committed some crime in the interim?” She couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice, especially when she lowered it. “The last time you showed up here, I never saw Barton again.”

  That raised a chuckle from the chancellor’s austere, thin mouth. “Come now, Phae. Barton came willingly, after all. And accidents do happen. Even he accepted the risks.”

  The colour draining from Phae’s face. Saskia’s was at critical mass.

  “I just wanted to check in,” the chancellor said, withdrawing. “There’s so much going on these days. Once upon a time, you worked alongside us to mitigate these threats that you and your friends invited into everyone’s lives. I’m just a glorified janitor for the last messes left behind.” He strode from the kitchen, scrutinizing the photos on the walls, gaze lingering on Phae’s small altar in the living room with its extinguished incense. “I have a feeling that the Darkling Moon hasn’t moved of its own accord. We’re all doing what we can to minimize . . . the consequences.”

  Saskia grabbed for the doorknob. Running now would do eff all, and Saskia couldn’t just rush off to her room, undetected, like she usually did when confrontation hovered. So she screwed her eyes shut and slammed the door behind her, hard.

  Someone in the kitchen shrieked — probably Lily, she was easily startled. But Phae was likely the most shocked when Saskia marched stiffly into the room. The chancellor seemed cheered by this development.

  “Speak of the devil and she shall appear.” The chancellor reached out a hand to Saskia. “Just the girl I wanted to see.”

  Phae recovered quickly and stepped closer to Saskia, eyeing the chancellor but leaving the question for her ward. “Saskia . . . what’s going on?” Her eyes went right to Saskia’s bleeding ear, and Saskia saw her guardian’s fingers itch to seize her face and get a better look.